1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a display control and particularly to controlling the screen display of images generated during optical character recognition operations.
2. Background Art
When employing OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology in a computer to recognize printed or handwritten characters, it is difficult to completely eliminate recognition errors. For this reason, it is a common practice to have an operator visually check recognition results to detect and correct errors.
When an operator makes a visual check of recognition results, the operator's efficiency depends largely on the design of a confirmation screen through which the operator compares a character image with its recognized character. In other words, if the confirmation process requires a large number of complicated steps, high work efficiency cannot be expected. Further, where the confirmation user interface is poorly designed, the operator may continually have to move his or her eyes up and down and side to side, which will eventually cause the operator to suffer severe eyestrain.
In order to reduce the number of steps for the confirmation work and relieve the work load of the operator, it is known in the art to use a display screen of the type shown in FIG. 9.
The screen shown in FIG. 9 displays all character images that are classified in the same category (character) as a result of recognition by an OCR system. This confirmation screen takes account of the human visual ability to easily detect, among a large number of characters having the same basic shape, a small number of characters having a different shape or shapes (i.e., misrecognized characters). The known screen design also enables the operator to determine a category as a result of recognition from correctly recognized character images, thus saving time to confirm one category for each character image. Thus, it is possible to perform efficient confirmation and correction works on the recognition results by using this confirmation screen.
This conventional confirmation screen would be very effective if character images recognized as belonging to the same category have substantially the same shape, such as printed characters.
However, if handwritten characters and/or printed characters of different fonts coexist, shapes of character images recognized as belonging to the same category would be considerably different from each other. In this case, it is difficult to make effective use of the human visual ability to easily detect, among a large number of characters having the same shape, a small number of characters having a different shape or shapes.